From FedoraProject

Activity report for Marcel Ribeiro Dantas

Date (YYYY-MM-DD)

City

State/Country

Activity

Role

Description

2013-06-*

Natal

RN/Brazil

Translation

Translator

1)Translated a major part of the wiki pages related to the role of Ambassador, corrected the ones that were already translated and fixed some broken links. 2) Helped translating through Transifex (mostly the Spins part).

2013-07-03

Natal

RN/Brazil

F19 Release Party

Ambassador

Every two Wednesdays, people in my town get together in a Hackerspace meeting celebrated at a FOSS-friendly company's office (Evolux). At first sight I noticed it was the perfect opportunity to promote a Release Party for F19, which ended up being my first talk as Fedora Ambassador which proved to be a great experience.

In no way, at that time, DVDs with F19 would get here quick enough, so I decided to buy myself a package of DVDs and print the "fold-at-home sleeves" at work according to here. Everything happened in a hurry, but I managed to burn/print/fold 25 DVDs which happened to be the perfect amount of media. I had a talk named "Fedora: Run, Contribute and join the community!" and had a Fedora banner to beautify the room :)

2013-07-*

Natal

RN/Brazil

Translation

Translator

Started being a translator for Yum. Officially in charge of translating the Fedora Installation Guide through Zanata.

2013-07-19 and 20

Cusco

Peru

F19 Release Party

Ambassador

Alex was very kind for inviting me to speak about Fedora in the F19 Release Party of Cusco, Peru at la Universidad Alas Peruanas Filial Cusco on the 19th of July and at Instituto Khipu on the 20th of July. Since it was a remote talk (videoconference), in both days, I chose not to focus my talk in things I believed to be very important for Fedora. I left it for Eduardo and other Spanish native speakers. It was too much responsability to teach people the basis of Fedora in Brazilian Portuguese or English, mostly because it was through a videoconference, where there is noise, internet problems and so on.

So what to talk about? Well, I believe Fedora is much more than an Operating System. Much more than a GNU/Linux distribution.. I think it's an idea. An idea that a community can build a high quality and free operating system. Well, actually even more than that.. In order to fully understand my point of view, you must watch my talk d:) I named it "Fedora: Sharing thoughts, experiences and love".

2013-08-06

Natal

RN/Brazil

F19 Release Party

Ambassador

Between the first F19 Release Party in Natal (2013-07-03) and the second (2013-08-21), Amador had the idea of one Release Party that would be definitely a party. We invited friends and friends of friends to his house, brought food, beer, soda and prepared a great experience for most people there.

We had two presentations, where I'd speak of Fedora Foundations and my personal views of the project, as I have done before with "Fedora: Sharing thoughts, experiences and love", though now I replaced "love" for "passion" :) It was enough to prepare people to what they were to see with Amador's talk about the difference between RHEL, Fedora and the release cycle of both Opearting Systems.

The difference in this event, based on what I had experienced so far, is that there was no way to keep a talk in 30 or 45 min. Every slide would bring up a discussion and we were always brainstorming and discussing practical situations and so on. At the end, our two talks combined took at least 3 to 4 hours which is insane ahahah The good thing is that we all ended the night with our minds changed, or at least with lots of new things to think about and discuss later :)

2013-08-06

Natal

RN/Brazil

Translation

Translator

Finally, the documentation arrived in Zanata in order to be translated. At first I thought I was being dumb for not finding the material to translate but then I found out sometimes they take a while to upload the material. In the meanwhile, I have been translating strings related to Anaconda through Transifex, as I told Cleiton. Now, the work in Zanata begins d:)

2013-08-21

Ipanguaçu

RN/Brazil

F19 Release Party / I ENSOL do Vale do Açu

Ambassador

Three hours driving till we finally arrived to Ipanguaçu, in the countryside of our state. Raphael, Amador and I had our talks selected to be presented during the I ENSOL Vale do Açu, which is the first edition of a free software meeting in a technical institute in Brazil (with several unities around the country, over ten only in our state).

We read in the news page of the event that several buses from other institutions were about to get there, crowded with students and so on. For me, who had a talk named "How to contribute to Fedora?" was obviously such a great chance to not only share the word of Fedora, get new users but also contributors. As a Release Party, we distributed over a hundred medias, about the same amount of stickers and were asked many questions numerous times while we were walking around the campus, not to mention during our talks.

It was nice to see people taking notes of what we said, asking all the sort of things about Fedora and really willing to try it out. Most of them were not very skillful when it comes to computers (lots of them were from other fields of knowledge) and about 3 out of 100 had heard of Fedora, and maybe 25% of Linux. Nonetheless, I had a whole hour to introduce them to Fedora, the four foundations what ended up explaining many important concepts, and Fedora Project with its roles, teams and activities. This talk specifically represented to me more not only the fulfillment of one of my tasks as Ambassador but also as a recent contributor to the Fedora Join SIG. I tried to make it simple for people to understand the ideas behind the Project, the foundations of Fedora and how to join our teams. I focused on the teams I'm a member of or have significant knowledge about such as Ambassadors, Marketing, Freemedia, Translation and SIGs like Medical/Join.

2013-09-06

Natal

RN/Brazil

Festa de Visuais

Ambassador

Festa de Visuais is a cultural event held regularly at the Department of Arts of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte. There are panel discussions during the day plus a party at night to close the event. The theme is basically political activism of any sort, reason for why I ended up being invited to speak about the Free Software Movement and its influences at the industry and other areas of the knowledge in the last century.

To be honest, I was very excited about it. It had been a long time since the last time I had spoken to an audience made mostly by laymen, when it comes to computers. So there I was about to start the panel discussion I would lead named "How Free Software influenced industry and other areas of knowledge". I tried hard to encourage people to give me feedback and take part in the discussion, and for sure there were some marvelous comments that day. At some point, I had bring up a discussion about freedom and I was curious about the concept of freedom those people had, since they were made of hippies, political activists, and so on. Oh, my! I loved it :)

Somehow I managed to fulfill the time I had very well. Explaining how free and open source software may be profitable was incredible. It was nice to see those eager eyes looking for a reasonable explanation of how Red Hat had made their 1 billion USD revenue in 2012. It reminded myself about a decade ago before becoming a free software activist when I didn't really have a clear idea of Free Software and what freedom really meant.

One thing for sure, many new things were learned that day (Oh yeah, I learned a lot too!). Right after it, I was invited from someone that was a friend of someone in the event staff to take part in another cultural event named "Cachaça Filosófica" where I would head a similar panel discussion. Every edition of "Cachaça Filosófica" is made of one guest, and I was the one for the first edition of October, 2013.